


Alternating Current

by Mithrigil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: (insert joke here), Chance Meetings, Hurt/Comfort, Jedi Mind Tricks don't work on Luke, M/M, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-30 07:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8523805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: When a salvager drags a Y-wing into Tosche Station with the pilot still inside, Luke bridges a connection to the world beyond Tatooine.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DuaeCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuaeCat/gifts).



As far as Luke Skywalker is concerned, there are three Truths of the Galaxy:

One, that nothing exciting ever happens on Tatooine.

Two, that anything exciting happening to him is contingent on him getting off Tatooine.

And Three, that if Uncle Owen has his way, Luke will never get off Tatooine.

Which is why, at eighteen, he laps up the Anchorhead gossip like it’s precious water, untainted by fungus and sand and reasonable doubt. He takes every chance he gets to sneak off to Tosche or Jundine or even Mos Espa and get his hands on any craft that comes through just to hear the pilots talk. In the hangars, it’s mostly complaints about what got them stranded on this lack-water backwater in the first place, but news is news, and maybe the fourth Truth of the Galaxy is that anyone who comes to Tatooine was in a more exciting place before they got here.

But the most exciting thing to happen to Luke--for now, anyway--won’t involve a pilot at all. At least not at first.

*              *

The starfighter Heenoni drags in is nothing like Luke’s ever seen before, but, then, what isn’t. Some parts of it are still smoldering, especially around the massive energy hole in the shreds of the fore-left wing and the twisted exhaust.

“You’re lucky I thought of you first,” Heenoni preens in Rodian-accented Huttese, slapping the hull with one hand and poking the proprietor Tasto in the chest with the other. “Jabba’d give me something for this prize but I’m counting on you wanting it more.”

“Not unless you shot it down yourself,” Tasto says.

Heenoni laughs, and the haggling routine begins, but Luke’s already gone to work. The pod of the pilot’s seat is clouded, but the way the hangar’s light’s reflecting off it it’s got to be from the inside. And the smoke’s almost black.

Luke interrupts the haggling. “Is the pilot still in there?”

Heenoni shrugs and clacks his mandibles. “You can have the corpse if you care so much.”

Something in Luke knows it’s not a corpse. Maybe it’s the lack of a charnel smell on top of all the ozone and sand and raw metal. Maybe it’s just a hope or a hunch. The glass of the pod is hot even through his work gloves, but he fumbles for the catch anyway, and finds it welded over from the outside by a laser scar, probably the same shot that took out the wing. “You didn’t even check--I think he’s alive in there!”

“Tasto, tell the kid to shut up or I’m taking my business to the Hutts.”

Luke ignores him. “Someone get me a glass-cutter!” Without waiting for one of the others to comply, Luke bangs on the pod with the butt of his wrench, still shouting. “Hello? Can you hear us in there? We’re gonna get you out, don’t worry.”

He’s dimly aware of Heenoni and Tasto complaining behind him, but there’s something else, something clearer: a tingle at the back of his mind that, yes, he’s somehow been heard. Yes, someone’s listening.

The shadow of a hand presses through the black smoke, like it could touch Luke’s without the transpasteel between.

By the time Luke finally gets that glass-cutter, the pilot inside is unconscious. But alive. Luke _knows_ he’s alive.

Beneath the helmet and its rebreather, the pilot turns out to be human, probably male and around Luke’s age, with short black hair, medium-dark skin, and two old white burn scars on his cheek.

*             *

“How is he?” Luke’s gonna owe Dr. Hethanke so much money after this--and it’s probably gonna rankle Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru something fierce--but maybe Luke can turn that into an excuse for him to work more in the city. It’s more than he’d make at the farm, anyway. Technically Owen doesn’t even pay him.

Hethanke wipes the sweat from her horns with the back of one hand. “He’ll live. I’ve got his leg in bacta, it’s pretty banged up, and he probably won’t wake up until tomorrow. You got him here just in time, kid. Friend of yours?”

Luke shakes his head, and explains. “Someone dragged his fighter in to Tosche without checking the cockpit.”

“Well, he’s gonna be your friend after this. He’s no Imperial, least I don’t think so, and he doesn’t look Guild either, so odds are one of them’s what shot him down. If you got me tangled up in some pudu--”

“I know, I know,” Luke sighs. “Look, if you think he’s stable, I’ll stay with him until he wakes up so you’ve got an alibi. Tell my folks I’m here. Make like you’re doing a house call or something. Or say that Old Ben’s gone wild again and you’re out with his tranqs.” Famously, any rumored Imperials who venture out in search of Old Ben never come back from the Jundland Wastes. 

Dr. Hethanke smiles, which always looks a little menacing around her black facial markings, but the roll of her eyes sends the message clear to Luke. “Fine. Fix the vaporator and the closet-sonic while you’re here and you’ve got yourself a deal. But if this friend of yours doesn’t pay me, you will.”

“That’s fair,” Luke says, even if it isn’t, exactly. But it’s more than he hoped for.

The doctor makes her exit, and Luke shows himself into her office where the pilot’s still laid out on a worktable, his left leg elevated in a bacta case and one hand cuffed to a strut. But he’s sleeping peacefully enough, or Luke thinks so anyway, and doesn’t stir when Luke sets to work on the sonic drawer, solder-blade humming and the potential energy of the room off the charts.

It’s maybe a little creepy, Luke thinks, but he’s kind of glad. Someone from offworld to talk to. Someone who _needs_ to explain why he’s here, once he’s awake. Someone he’ll probably have to stay in contact with, and a _pilot_ , maybe working for an independent contractor or a planetary defense. Maybe he can get Luke a place, grease a few wheels. Maybe they’ll hit it off and Luke won’t have to go back to Anchorhead at all.

*            *

Sure enough, the pilot doesn’t wake up until Luke’s finished both of the doctor’s tasks. He’s buzzing too much to sleep--and Owen and Beru haven’t commed him at the doctor’s place, so he probably shouldn’t--so he starts in on a couple of the doctor’s kitchen appliances as long as he’s here. Maybe she’ll reduce the pilot’s rate or something. And--

The worktable rattles, and the pilot’s cuff pulls at the strut with a metal-on-metal _clang_.

Luke bolts to his feet and runs back to the office. Yep, the pilot’s sitting up, or trying to anyway. The medical blanket’s falling down his chest-- _wow_ he’s in good shape--and pooling in his lap, but once Luke sees those eyes he can’t look down anymore. They’re so _blue_. Not sky-blue like Luke’s, fuel-blue, like transpasteel tanks of Clouzon-36.

“What in the Sith Hells,” he starts, and his eyes blast wide.

“Um, hey,” Luke says, articulately. “You crashed on Tatooine. I brought you here to get medical help. Are you okay?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I don’t know, I’m not the doctor. She just left me here with you to make sure you didn’t run off.”

The pilot jostles his handcuff. “Like this wasn’t enough?”

“She only cuffed one hand.”

“Yeah, and one foot.” The bacta case swings, just a little, and the pilot grimaces and flops back down onto the worktable.

Luke grits his teeth in sympathy. “Well, that leaves you one of each if you need ‘em.”

The pilot glowers at him again, as wide-eyed as before but narrower at the top, like his eyebrows are making the eyeballs set somehow. “Look, I don’t know you, but I’ve got places to be that aren’t Tatooine.”

“You and the rest of the galaxy,” Luke says.

The pilot laughs, a little, more like a scoff through his nose, the way that means the joke didn’t land. That’s fine, Luke didn’t think it was funny either. “Where’s my ship?”

“Tosche station. You can probably buy it back from Tasto once you settle with Dr. Hethanke.”

“It’s my ship! Why should I have to buy it back?”

“Because if you don’t, it won’t be your ship anymore.”

“And my astromech?”

“There wasn’t an astromech when they hauled it in. Maybe it ejected?”

“This just keeps getting better and better,” the pilot snarls, his head thudding down to the pillow.

He winces--the same time as Luke, actually. “I can go look for it once the doctor gets back. If you have the model number and owner’s code I--”

The pilot shudders, full body, and both of his bindings stutter against their holds. Even after that spasm, something’s still shaking in the air around him--the same kind of infra-particular hum that Luke sometimes feels when he’s been racing in Beggar’s Canyon too long, or on the edge of the Jundland Wastes.

Then the pilot looks Luke clean in the eyes again, and makes a weird pinching gesture with his free hand. “You don’t need to go looking for my droid,” he says, low. Kind of portentous.

Luke twitches--that _walked-across-your-grave_ feeling creeps up his spine--but shrugs. “Okay, I won’t. I’m sure it can find its way back to you anyway if the Tuskens haven’t gotten there first.”

The pilot blinks, twice. Then a third time, like Luke’s done something really weird. But every time his eyes come back to Luke’s like they never left. His fingertips twitch again, then collapse with the rest of his hand back to his chest.

“What,” he starts, and then shakes his head quickly like he’s banishing a thought. “Okay, no. Never mind. What should I call you?”

“Luke. What about you?”

“Hondo Ohnaka,” the pilot says, which Luke somehow _knows_ is a bald-faced lie, but also that it’s not supposed to matter. It’s a codename. A secret. A marker of things literally out-of-this-world, of a galaxy so big that people need more than one name to really live in it.

“Okay,” Luke says, excitement thrumming through his hand as he reaches down to shake, “good to meet you, Hondo. And glad you’re okay.”

“That makes two of us,” Hondo says, propped on one elbow and grinning as their palms make contact--

\--and something. Something hiccups. Like a charge without ground, racing through them both so fast that Luke doesn’t know who started it and never will. It sears the sockets of Luke’s eyes, slices through every limb _except_ his right hand where he’s touching Hondo’s, fills his lungs with the horrible charnel stench he didn’t get before, the proof that this pilot was alive in the craft and somewhere, a different one is dying--

_connect connect connect connect_

\--and Hondo’s eyes are even wider than before, and _wild_ , plasteel-black pupils swallowing up almost all the blue--

“What,” Luke says this time, an echo of Hondo’s, a minute ago.

Hondo just curses.

*          *

Out on the dunes of the Jundland Wastes, C1-10P putters from shadow to shadow as fast as his mismatched legs can take him. It’s not the _worst_ place his idiot organics have dropped him--kriffing _Malachor_ comes to mind--but it’s definitely among the top five. Sand is a menace. C1-10P deliberately guns its thrusters at intervals to melt his trail into a filthy expletive in Binary. If any idiot organics slip on the resulting glass and injure themselves, that’s just a bonus.

But it doesn’t look like any idiot organics are coming. C1-10P’s sensors pick up no organic forms in any direction. No small creatures. No inorganic forms either, for that matter. Nothing but this asinine sand. Which is strange, because according to his databanks this planet is supposed to be inhabited--against all reason, but, of course, idiot organics. So C1-10P sends out his distress beacon and turns on his solar panels to catch the last vestiges of the sun’s-light for what promises to be a long, boring evening, and continues his puttering.

Night falls. No enormous spider-crabs come out of the earth, which is another point in this planet’s favor. A few TTW-16-series vaporators mark the landscape at intervals, but most of them are inoperable husks. The disrespect their past organics have shown by leaving these good machines to die is absolutely disgusting. C1-10P tells the first operating vaporator as much when he runs across it, but the vaporator can barely respond. Are vaporators not sapient on this planet? Or _were_ they, once, and are no longer because of the organics and their requisite idiocy?

As C1-10P contemplates this atrocity, another being trips his sensors. Organic, this time. In a domicile, carved directly into the bedrock. He will answer for the crimes of his fellow organics, C1-10P resolves.

“Hello there,” the old man says as C1-10P looms menacingly in the doorway. He is not intimidated; if anything, he greets C1-10P like an old friend, with a tight organic smile and a pleasant inner-Core voice like the old war heroes.

Hm. Old war heroes.

C1-10P scans its databanks to see if this organic is anyone he knows.

He is.

C1-10P swears at length.

“No one’s called me that in years,” Obi-Wan Kenobi says, grinning ear-to-ear.

*       *

“What,” Luke says again, and no, he can’t finish the sentence this time either.

Hondo tries, though. “The hell was that?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you!”

“You’re not asking me anything, you’re just saying _what_ over and over!”

“Only because I don’t know what to ask!” Luke looks down at his hand--it’s shaking, still--then down at Hondo again. The worktable is twitching like there’s about to be an earthquake and the restraining cuff just kind of _pops_ open, and Hondo opens his eyes like he isn’t surprised to be free.

Well, he does that for a second, at any rate. Then he just glares. “Who do you work for?”

“No one!” Luke says. “I mean, for my uncle, and whatever jobs I can get around the docking bays--”

“You’re not fooling anyone. What is this, some kind of simulation?”

“What are you even talking about?”

Hondo squints, propping himself up almost to a sitting position now that he’s uncuffed. His eyebrows lower, almost knot, like he’s looking through Luke instead of at him. “Nothing,” he says quietly, “never mind. You’re telling the truth. This is just a weird feeling. That’s all.”

Luke nods and stoops to pick up the cuff. “How’d you get this open?”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s just shoddy workmanship. You said this is a doctor’s office?”

“Yeah. Doctor Hethanke.”

“And where’d she go?”

“Um, she left in case you’re a criminal she’s not supposed to treat. You’re not running from the Hutts, are you?”

“Not this week.”

“Then you’re probably fine. She’ll come back and get you out of the casing and then you can just--wait. Not this _week_?”

Hondo grins. “Let’s just say I’ve got a long history with them.”

“How long could it be? You can’t be that much older than me.”

“You mean you’ve never heard of Hondo Ohnaka?”

“Yeah, enough to know you’re not him. He’s Weequay.”

“I could be using a hologram.”

“Not unconscious in a damaged fighter.”

Hondo smirks. “You never know. Maybe the tech just hasn’t made it out to this dustheap. And that thing you felt before was just a short-out.”

“No. You’re not him.” Luke reaches out to put the palm of his hand on Hondo’s cheek. “You don’t have to lie--”

_connect connect connect_

\--something surges and swims around him, around them both, hotter than the deepest deserts at double-sun noon. Not the dry heat of the sand, something thicker, wetter, sulfurous. Luke can’t blink, can’t look away either, while the whole world turns the chemical blue of--

“Ezra,” Luke realizes, and the name just falls off his lips, “your name’s Ezra.”

\--Ezra’s eyes, and Luke knows Ezra’s seeing a different blue entirely, pale like his and the Tatooine sky just after dawn, the blue of potential water that never falls--

Ezra grabs Luke’s wrist, like he’d pry him off if he could. But no, once a bridge is built, it can’t be unbuilt, and the connection holds true. Luke sees more than he can process, waves and waves of input, blue beams of light and spinning red lasers cutting into Ezra’s cheek, a flash of a space station falling out from underneath him, a voice in the dark promising knowledge and power and the crunch of mechanical legs on an ancient floor. He doesn’t know what Ezra sees. Maybe the same things, twisted. But none of that has ever happened to Luke, and none of it will unless he gets off Tatooine.

 _you will,_ a voice says, old and crisp and strangely familiar, _but now is not the time_

Ezra’s lips move, and Luke pitches forward, his hand still pressed to Ezra’s cheek over a clear layer of sweat. They’re awfully close. They could be closer. Luke feels _pulled_ , like whatever’s connecting them is already done with being so far apart, the resistance impossible to resist any more. His forehead touches Ezra’s. His hair’s so short--Luke’s is long enough to build a curtain around their faces, but he couldn’t see the light of the office anyway before and he’s seeing _so much_ now, even if it’s all a blur.

“I don’t know,” Luke admits, but doesn’t finish, just keeps sinking closer.

“I don’t either,” Ezra says, and his breath is cool and gentle on Luke’s lips.

“We could--”

“Maybe,” Ezra agrees, “yeah, this is new but I’ve done weirder--”

“I know.” Luke’s seen enough now to know that’s not a lie. “You’ve seen so much, I want to see it too.”

The kiss just sort of happens, the inevitable collision of two bodies in each other’s gravity. Luke’s kissed people before, but _this_ isn’t even about the same things. It’s beyond touch. He’s--stars this sounds crazy even to him but he’s _in Ezra’s head_ and _Ezra’s in his_ and there’s a world beyond Tatooine, a barely-charted galaxy and something even deeper running parallel to it. Luke flies through them both, clinging to Ezra’s cheeks as their chests come together too and their breathing matches. No, not matches, mirrors. Some kind of symbiosis. Quick riding pulses, one giving in then the other; a swipe of Ezra’s tongue as Luke inhales, a touch of his hand to pull him back in.

All three of Luke’s Truths of the Galaxy are lies now too. Technically he’s still on Tatooine and it’s _amazing_ and exciting and _happening to him_ , and he knows the third Truth is a lie too. He’ll fly. For real, off-planet. He’s seen it. He’s _seeing_ it. He’s soaring in a starfighter like Ezra’s over a glittering silver space station, explosions peppering space out the corners of his eyes.

“ _Karabast,_ you’re--” Ezra chokes out, under him in the real world but it _echoes_ in Luke’s head and he chases it down, keeps kissing, “--you’re stronger than you look.”

Luke holds on tight, cards his hand through Ezra’s hair and presses in. “Too good,” he mumbles, “can’t stop-- _oh_ ,” another surge wracks his brain, and Ezra kisses his throat like he really knows what he’s doing, and the way his leg is lifted in the sling it’s pressing up _right between Luke’s_ and that’s still not close enough, not with how good the rest feels. How good _this_ feels.

He’s supposed to be here. He’s supposed to feel like Ezra does inside. Nothing’s truer in this world or any other.

_somewhere deep in Ezra’s mind, there’s a brown-eyed girl with a crown of braids, and she’s beautiful--_

“Excuse me, young men,” someone coughs from the doorway, “I believe this droid belongs to one of you.”

Luke panics so hard that he collides with Ezra’s bacta cast and both of them scream.

Crazy Old Ben Kenobi is standing in the hallway, with Dr. Hethanke and a sand-caked orange astromech. He reaches out and twists his hand on the air, like he caught an insect and isn’t sure whether to pinch it or let it go.

All the blood in Luke’s body rushes up to his brain. Or maybe he just faints from embarrassment. Either way, the world goes dark.

*     *

Luke’s woken up in unfamiliar places before; dehydration in the dunes, a couple of landspeeder injuries, at least one pretty nasty thunk to the head courtesy of a low-hanging crane in Mos Espa. So when the ceiling doesn’t match up with the farm in Anchorhead, and Luke’s temples feel like someone took a pulsar-hammer to his skull, it’s not strange, just painful.

“Oh good,” Dr. Hethanke says, in bleary silhouette, “you’ve come to. Anything still in pain?”

Luke’s pretty sure he whines about his headache for a couple of minutes without really hearing it. Dr. Hethanke hands him a painkiller cocktail and he drinks it down, no questions asked, and it starts taking effect after the first couple of gulps. By the time he’s downed it the lights don’t have haloes anymore and he can see Dr. Hethanke, mostly in-focus, sitting in her office chair.

“Tasto said you passed out from smoke inhalation at the hangar, that’s all. You’re going to be just fine.”

Luke blinks. “But what about--”

“The pilot in that craft? Yeah, Tasto said you’d probably ask after him. He was dead when they dragged him in. I’m sorry, kid.”

“But,” Luke starts again, and his headache flares up around the cool edges of the painkiller. That’s not what he saw. That’s not what he felt. He _knows_ , the guy’s name was Ezra but he said it was Hondo Ohnaka and he--they--

“You might have hallucinated,” Dr. Hethanke says, her facial markings knit into a dozen frowns. “That’s not uncommon, given what you inhaled. Tasto already covered your treatment, though--he said since you had to see something so gruesome, he wouldn’t take it out of your pay.”

“That’s...good, I guess.” Good, sure, but still not _right_. Luke knows what he saw, what he felt. It was so real. Ezra was so real. Luke tries to put it all together again--rescuing Ezra from the cockpit, the missing astromech, sending Dr. Hethanke off so she could have an alibi--the _wonder_ and the feeling when he kissed Ezra, and Old Ben--

He shakes his head, quickly, shakes the thought out of his ear. Necking with a charming, worldly pilot _does not belong_ in the same dream as Old Ben Kenobi.

Besides. Nothing exciting ever happens to Luke Skywalker. It’s one of the Truths of the Galaxy.

*  *

Ezra and C1-10P roll in to the rebel base ten days late and on the wrong ship, but with all their parts in working order. Ezra’s leg finished healing two days ago. C1-10P still has sand in his auxiliaries. This is patently unfair.

As soon as Kanan’s done hugging him and thanking the stars he’s okay, Ezra just grins and starts talking like it wasn’t a big deal. “Almost got caught,” he admits, “but I found this, um, weird kid who might’ve been, you know, like us. But Old Ben said it wasn’t safe for me to take him here yet.”

“Old Ben?” Kanan asks, eyebrow up.

“Yeah,” Ezra says, “Old Ben Kenobi. He said thanks for the idea about the beacon.”

Kanan freezes. And curses, loudly.

C1-10P’s not that impressed, though. He sent Kenobi’s message to Senator Organa as soon as he could get a signal.

**


End file.
